


Indelible Marks

by lustmordred



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, 5 Times, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harold’s been mapping John’s scars. He makes up stories to explain the ones he doesn’t know the origin of. There aren’t very many he doesn’t know the origin of. He’s always been very good at finding out information other people don’t want him to know. There are a few that even he can’t explain though. Five of them so far, to be exact.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indelible Marks

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve never written one of those “5 Times” stories before in any fandom I’ve ever been in, but of course I’ve seen them. Never had an idea for one though. This is sort of my take on that trope. I’m sure I did it wrong, but oh well.

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.   
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.  
 _\--Chuck Palahniuk (Diary) ___

 

It’s dark in John’s apartment. The wall on the west side is all windows, but they’ve drawn the curtains. No one knows better than they do how many eyes are really watching when you think you’re all alone. The bed is unmade, the sheets and covers tangled and kicked to the foot of the mattress, and they lay there like two bits of driftwood washed ashore. John’s on his back with his eyes closed, but he’s not sleeping. Harold lays there beside him on his side, his head resting on a pillow, listening to his own heartbeat leveling out and John’s easy breathing. 

There’s a light on in the kitchen. It barely reaches them, but its enough to find each other in the dark with. Harold picks up one of John’s hands and touches his fingers, his own fingers sliding over John’s like he’s counting them, satisfying himself that they’re all still there. 

Still five. Four whole, fine and strong fingers and a thumb. 

Harold’s been mapping John’s scars. He makes up stories to explain the ones he doesn’t know the origin of. There aren’t very many he doesn’t know the origin of. He’s always been very good at finding out information other people don’t want him to know. There are a few that even he can’t explain though. Five of them so far, to be exact. 

There’s a scar on the right side of John’s mouth. It’s so old that it’s almost not there at all, but Harold knows. He’s intimately acquainted with that part of John’s anatomy and lips are very sensitive. He feels it there every time they kiss. 

It’s old, so he thinks of it as a scar from John’s childhood. When all he has done and all that’s been done to him were yet undone. With everything still ahead and waiting. 

John didn’t dress up in superhero costumes like other boys his age and try to fly off the roof of his house. Even then, he was too smart for that, and he always liked Batman the best anyway. Batman was smarter, more clever, more lethal, he had less scruples and all of the best toys. Batman could do almost everything better than everyone else, except he couldn’t fly. John knew that and he never tried. Besides, Batman was fiction. John’s real hero when he was a kid was his own father. 

He had friends, of course. Even as a kid, he was the sort of person to inspire the kind of trust that built deep friendships. Unfortunately, he was a military brat, so most of the friendships, deep though they were, were doomed from the start. He made friends with other military brats because they understood how it was. Their dads (or moms) were their heroes, too. They dressed up in their parents’ oversized clothes and pretended to be soldiers. They made toy guns out of sticks and two-by-fours and took turns being the enemy.

It was just a toy gun and John was just a boy. He tried to take it away from his friend and he didn’t know how to do that yet. The rough end of the two-by-four hit him in the mouth and bloodied his lip. It split open against his teeth. 

He was lucky not to lose a couple of teeth, but at the time he didn’t feel so lucky. 

He lost a friend that day, but it didn’t matter. His parents moved them all a couple of weeks later, all the way from Colorado to Tacoma, Washington, and his dad shipped out to somewhere in the middle east a few days after that. John had three stitches in his lip when he said goodbye to his father. 

Harold considers this a happy story. Most of the stories he associates with that scar are happy. He likes them that way. He has another story for that same scar involving John crashing his bike in the backyard after riding it through his mother’s clean sheets hanging out to dry on the clothesline. They both make Harold smile, but he likes the first one better. 

There’s another scar on that same side of John’s face, two thin lines on the right side of his chin. They’re not as old and faded as the one on his mouth, but they’re old enough that Harold only sees them if the light is right and John’s head is turned just so. The light from the kitchen isn’t quite bright enough for him to see them there now, but he reaches up and touches John’s face with his fingertips. There they are under his fingers, raised slightly, thin and even like scars left by cat scratches. 

Harold imagines a dusky barroom brawl for that scar. 

John was twenty-one and it was his birthday. A friend suggested they go out, so they went out for some drinks at a bar they liked. He was a soldier already, but not yet an agent or a killer. Still just a young boy, really. Handsome though. Harold has seen pictures and knows that John has always been a pleasure to look at. Like most young men that age, he was immortal. Everything he would one day do was still sitting there, waiting for him to catch up. 

A pretty girl bought him a drink and flirted with him. John knew how to flirt better back then and his smiles were real and honest. He flirted back, bought her a drink and made her agree to have it with him. The girl laughed. John laughed. His friend coaxed a few guys into a drunken rendition of “Happy Birthday.” 

In Harold’s version of reality, John’s drinking boilermakers. 

A man came out of the back of the bar, saw John laughing with his girlfriend, and before anyone knew what was happening, he sucker-punched him. Even then, John had a temper and his fuse was a lot shorter. He fell back, caught himself, and hit the man back. The man cut John’s face with a broken bottle. It’s such a vivid false memory that Harold can actually picture the glass. He knows it was green. A Dos Equis beer bottle. 

Harold isn’t sure what the outcome was. Sometimes he pictures John winning the fight and walking away while the other man picks himself up off the dirty floor, now littered with his broken teeth. Other times, John loses because John was young and sometimes John _does_ lose. Usually Harold is a little annoyed with him when he imagines John getting his ass kicked. 

These are scars left by the normal life he knows John had once upon a time. He likes them best of all. 

On John’s left wrist, just below the fingers Harold keeps counting, there’s a scar like a star-shaped pit. A watch would rest there. When John’s dressed, he wears a watch right there. It goes nicely with his suits and his white shirts and Harold knows he doesn’t wear it to hide the scar because, like most of John’s scars, he doesn’t even think about it anymore. It’s such a small scar, such a tiny little pit, but unlike those on his face, that is deceptive. 

In the story Harold tells himself about that scar, a cheap watch saved John’s life. 

He was in Syria, he was in Iraq, he was in Afghanistan, Niger, Libya, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, South Korea, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia… somewhere that English isn’t the first or even the second language and the sun is always high in the sky and hot. Somewhere people die every day and no one even notices. If John died there, he had no one back home waiting for the news. There was no one to weep beside his grave and accept condolences for their loss. He would not be a significant loss to anyone. 

He knew how to take a gun out of a man’s hand without out getting shot by then. His days of playing in the yard with sticks instead of pistols were behind him. He was still following in his daddy’s footsteps, but he was wiser. When he remembered his father the war hero, it didn’t make him excited to charge off into battle, it made him sad. It made him long for home. 

Under the desert sun, everything was the same color of golden dirt brown. Even the ruins the soldiers hid behind were that color of drab. The same color as their camouflage uniforms and the grit on their faces and in their hair. Harold imagines a war scene like something from a movie. _Lawrence of Arabia_ , maybe. They hid behind the bombed-out ruins of a village made of mud that was mixed from water so rancid not even the dogs would drink it. Bullets whizzed by, buzzing like wasps, and the only thing for them to do was wait for their enemy to run out of ammo. 

John can be extremely patient. He can stay in the same spot waiting for hours and he’ll never complain, but maybe he hadn’t learned such patience yet. So he stood up to fire back and a bullet intended for his heart or his stomach hit his cheap old Timex instead. It had traveled a long way to get there and was at the end of its trajectory, so the watch was enough to stop it. The mangled face of the watch broke John’s wrist and a piece of shattered cog shrapnel pierced his skin and cut him deep. 

There’s another story where there scar comes from a fire poker. Peter Aradt, Jessica’s cowardly, abusive husband, found the nerve to fight back for just a moment. It’s not as dramatic as the other story though.

The largest mystery scar is on John’s back. It’s ugly and puckered just below his right shoulder blade and shaped like the hand of Captain Hook. Harold can’t see it or touch it with John laying on his back, but his fingers have encountered it many times before when holding onto him. He’s pretty sure that one put John in the hospital for a while. 

Sometimes John isn’t the best fighter. It’s rare when that happens, but he does on occasion lose a fight. Harold thinks that scar is one of those times. 

The CIA sent him to kill a man and nobody told him how really dangerous he was. Maybe they didn’t know or maybe it was one of those times when John wasn’t supposed to come back. John shot him, but this was before he knew how to do it quickly and painlessly. He didn’t miss, but the man he thought was dead picked himself up off the floor when John turned to leave and stuck a knife in his back. A little more to the left, a little deeper, and John’s lung would have been punctured. It would have filled up with blood in a couple of hours and he would have suffocated in his own fluids. 

In Harold’s story, the man pulls the knife out of John’s back to stab him again because he’s still standing. 

John turns and takes the knife away from him. He kills the man with his own knife. Then before he can go to a hospital, he has to clean it up. Knives are messy. Knives leave trace evidence all over the place. John’s blood and the dead man’s blood are all mixed up on the floor. He stops his own bleeding with a quick field dressing to buy himself time to clean it up. He only needs enough time to do that and get out of there. Then he can bleed all he wants. 

Harold pets his hand through John’s hair. It’s lighter now than when they first met. There’s a lot more grey in it and a lot less black. His face is more drawn now than it used to be, there are more lines. Still, he’s a little more than ten years younger than Harold, and he could pass for twenty years younger if he ever got rid of the grey. The fifth scar is there behind John’s left ear, hidden by his hair. 

Another bar fight? An injury from high school sports? Sometimes Harold thinks so, but it’s not quite old enough for him to really believe it. It’s a straight line in his scalp. A missed shot. 

Just because John’s one of the most dangerous animals out there, it doesn’t mean he’s the only predator. As one of the dangerous creatures, he’s a prime target. 

A sniper on a rooftop watched him through the scope of his rifle. He could have shot John a hundred times, but he didn’t. He watched him first, like a tiger stalking a stray cow. He watched him until John could feel the eyes on him and would have slipped away, gone under cover. Only then did the sniper take his shot--only when he sensed fear in his quarry and was in danger of losing his chance completely. He smiled as he pulled the trigger, but John was on alert, he moved just enough. The bullet hit him in the head, knocked him to the ground in a spray of blood spatter and knocked him out. 

It looked like a kill-shot. He stayed down, so it had to be a kill-shot. Besides, the sniper was the best. He never ever missed. He watched John go down and stay down. After that, he didn’t think about it. 

John came to twenty minutes later, but the sniper was gone. John was believed to be dead for a few months after that. 

Harold has another story for that scar involving torture and a dark room, John’s head bashed against a wall for refusing to answer questions with more than his name, rank and number (all of them false). He doesn’t like that story. It makes him a little queasy. 

John’s had a lot of names, almost as many as Harold. He has a lot of scars. There is a lot Harold doesn’t know. He’s not used to not knowing. He always knows or knows how to find out. There are too many days, months and years of John’s life that are blank pages. He could ask him to fill them in and John might tell him. He wouldn’t lie. Some of those scars he has received in Harold’s service, and Harold knows better than to believe that John does it for the numbers. He has reasons of his own and the numbers, strangers who don’t always deserve to be saved, are pretty far down on that list of reasons. 

“I know exactly everything about you, Mr. Reese,” Harold said that first time they met by the water. Even then, he knew that wasn’t true, but showing your hand to someone like John Reese, especially when you want something from him, is just a bad idea. 

John knows better now. Perhaps he thinks it evens the playing field a little. Harold doesn’t pretend to know what or how John thinks, but it seems like something that would cross his mind. It makes sense. They wouldn’t be where they are, side by side in John’s bed with the lights out and the curtains drawn, if there wasn’t any way for them to find level ground. John likes having secrets. It’s not even about the secrets themselves, he just likes having a past Harold can’t look into whenever he wants. He lets one slip out whenever Harold is getting particularly arrogant. 

Harold had almost forgotten how much he likes surprises before John came along. 

He fills in the blanks himself. He knows they’re not true, but sometimes when he finds out the truth, he’s not very far off the mark. There used to be twice as many mysterious scars on John’s body than there are now. It’s taken Harold nearly three years to cut that number down to five, most of them in the past year. He sees John naked pretty regularly now, so he knows where all of them are. What he can’t see, he can feel. He knows the history of some of them and they’re not mysteries anymore. 

There’s a scar on John’s back just above the Captain Hook scar from a bullet he took in the back on a mission in Russia. The mark wasn’t buying Kara and John’s cute couple act. He shot John, Kara shot him, then John shot the girl the man was with. She wasn’t going for a weapon, she was just there, but for the same reasons cops always handcuff the girlfriend, John put one between her eyes. 

It doesn’t bother him. Harold asked, but John said no. No, it doesn’t bother him that she might have been innocent. What bothers him more is that it doesn’t bother him at all. 

That’s how Harold knows it’s not really about the numbers for John. John _can_ walk away. If Harold could let him go, John could walk away. If Harold dies, he knows John won’t go on saving people for the machine. He will not be the contingency. People die every day all over the world. They scream and they rage and they cry and their world ends and _the_ world doesn’t even notice. There are countries where genocide is something that can happen between sunrise and sunset, it can happen while you’re driving down the road. John knows this because he’s seen it. He’s even done it himself. Harold knows it because he remembers laying beside Nathan on a cot with his spine fractured, listening to the sound of Nathan’s dying heart go _beep beep beep… beep… beep……_ because Harold had refused to do anything. “People die. They’ve been doing it for a long, long time,” that’s what he had told Nathan to justify it and Nathan had just looked at him helplessly. Already, he knew what Harold would only come to understand after Nathan was gone. Harold had believed that “irrelevant” meant other people, not him or the people he loves. If John dies, it will break his heart, but unlike John, Harold won’t stop. There have been some very close calls, too. 

The two of them are like students who have attended the very same class, but learned a completely different lesson.

John opens his eyes in the dark and turns his head on the pillow, meeting Harold’s staring eyes. Harold’s not wearing his glasses, but he’s never really needed them to see. John knows that now, so he doesn’t even pretend with him anymore.

“What are you doing, Harold?”

“Nothing.”

John smiles. Harold can just see it in the faint light. He doesn’t smile as much as he used to, Harold thinks. Not because he’s less happy. He’s just stopped pretending. He’s more at ease. More content. He has a very pretty smile. 

“You’re doing it again,” John says. 

“Doing what?”

“I’m not sure. Trying to figure me out, I think.”

“You’re not very hard to figure out, Mr. Reese.”

John’s smile widens to a grin. Whenever he smiles like that, Harold has the unexplainable feeling that he is missing the point. 

“‘Mr. Reese,’ hmm?” 

Harold feels the flush heating his face and clears his throat. “You’re not very hard to figure out, John.”

John rolls over on top of him, his weight held off of Harold on his elbows, and surprises him with a kiss. Harold can feel the scar on his mouth in the kiss. His hands are trapped for a minute between them and against his arm he can feel the scar on one side where Kara shot John, the scar on the other where Simmons shot him, and the scar in the middle where Agent Snow’s sniper shot him. Each bullet almost killed him, but like a cat with infinite lives, he is still there. Harold knows better than to count on that now. Nathan taught him that. Carter was a painful reminder. Even John can die.

But maybe not today. 

The cordless phone beside the bed rings and John reaches over to pick it up and answer it. He listens for a few seconds before handing it to Harold and rolling off of him. He sits up and starts to get dressed. 

Harold puts the phone to his ear and listens. The regurgitated digital voice of the machine starts to speak and he sighs. “We have another number.”

XXX


End file.
